comics

Last year I tried reading Joe Hill’s first novel Heart-Shaped Box and couldn’t finish it. It was horror but to me felt like an Eli Roth movie or part of the Saw franchise where it was just sort of unremittingly shitty to its characters, kind of revelling in the power that the writer has to play god with the shits under their command. I hated that book.

Maybe there’s a bit of a softening to how Hill portrays people, but damn did I ever give a shit about the Locke family and their myriad not-great decisions that let terrible supernatural things happen to them.

The story starts off with the violent death of the father of the Locke family. He dies trying to protect his wife and kids from a murderer. He’d always said though that if anything happened to him the family should move back to his family home in Lovecraft County.

In the first volume (which I’d read a few years ago without following up) that kind of cutesy naming thing (“See, it’s in New England and it’s horror, so the county is Lovecraft! Like the writer! Get it? Eh?”) bugged me. Everything felt very on the nose and wink-nudge nerdculture nodding (the gym teacher named Whedon and stuff). It was a little less annoying this time (especially after having recently dealt with all the Dark Tower self-referential bullshit) and once you get past the first volume the story really settles into itself and gets good.

The hook to the story is that in this family home there are all these magickal keys and locks and doors that the kids find and have to protect from nefarious forces. It’s a great hook and as it goes along the “stupid rules” make sense. The villain has an actually interesting endgame and uses one of the traditional horror tropes that gives me the screaming habublies to achieve it.

So yes. It won Eisners and all that so the book isn’t some undiscovered gem; it doesn’t need my praise but it has it.

Last July I began reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I finished it last week. I’m glad I read it but there were definitely aspects I liked more than others.

I came to the series through Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From a Multiverse‘s Gunshooter strips and the upcoming movie. I like to know about these big event pieces of fiction that people will talk about even if I haven’t been to a movie theatre since Fury Road (no wait, I saw The Force Awakens in the theatre). In this case I wanted to get a bit of my own opinionating underway before the flood of other people’s thoughts overwhelm me. Casting Idris Elba as the gunslinger pissed off racists (Rosenberg’s second wave of Gunshooter strips reflected this casting) so that’s cool, but I wanted to have more of a reason to care about this story, and that meant reading it.

There are seven books in the series and they range unevenly between post-apocalyptic western and alternate-universe-hopping Sliders knockoff and self-indulgent hamhanded metafictional pastiche. I liked it best when it was doing the western thing (The Gunslinger (Gunshooter interpretation), the middle 3/4 of Wizard and Glass and the non-priest-focused parts of Wolves of the Calla), and the ending was pretty great. I hated the Doombots and the Harry Potter references and the “Stephen King: maintainer of the universe” bullshit. The way things were kludged together in terms of timelines and reinventing how timetravel worked with a handwave about a keystone world annoyed me, as did most of the dialogue.

But. I’m glad I read it. I like it as a frame for reading the rest of Stephen King’s work through. It felt supremely self-indulgent but that’s what you trust an author with, right? If it had ended worse I’d have been pissed off, but it ends well (deus ex machina note from Stephen King aside).

I read the first couple of trade paperback collections of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerrera’s Y: The Last Man years ago, and I think the only reason I didn’t continue reading it was the usual library dance of the next volume not being on the shelf when I wanted it and blah blah blah laziness. At my new library, all five volumes of the omnibus edition were just sitting on the shelf when I was wandering by and I decided it was time to fill in that gap.

Y: The Last Man is pretty good!

I knew I liked the premise but in my head since I’d never completed the series it was just a cool premise. I didn’t remember much else about it. I was a little worried it was going to feel very heavy-handed or that it was going to devolve into bullshit (which is my impression of what happened with Fables, though I may be wrong about that). But Vaughan writes really good dialogue (and you can totally hear how Saga is by the same writer). There’s a lot of good weirdness and I like how the story isn’t a slave to its premise. Other males are born; there’s acknowledgement that all sorts of species will go extinct; there’s jokiness through the action scenes. It gets a bit more globe-trotty than I expected in the later volumes and I like the eventual sidelining of Yorick as the key to everything and focusing on how he’s dealing with his very changed life as the object of humanity’s quest. I’d also say it stuck the landing.

I like space operas. They are a very comfortable kind of fiction for me. Assembled families in space ships going around and having adventures is all I really want in life and is actually one of the things I’m saddest will never be a real thing I can do. Since I’ll never get to live in a spaceship I make do with making this kind of thing my favourite kind of RPG scenario and read comics that follow the path.

Dustin Nguyen and Jeff Lemire’s Descender is one of those stories. The main character is a companion robot who is the key to robot evolution and was missed when the majority of robots were exterminated after turning on humanity.

Machine Moon is the second volume in the series and it remains pretty good. Nguyen’s watercoloury art makes it feel more serious than it might otherwise. The dialogue is good and I like the characters and the big problems they’re facing. The main problem is just one of serialization; I’d like to read the whole story in one go but can’t.

Tom Gauld’s Mooncop is beautiful. The quietness of the police officer’s story on a gradually emptying satellite matches Gauld’s art-style perfectly. I can’t really say much more about it besides that it is good. I read it on half a lunch break and spent the rest of the break thinking about it.

I know my book reviews were never very in-depth or insightful, but they were here and were some content for the site for a big chunk of its existence. I don’t know exactly why I stopped doing it, but obviously, I did.

There’s part of me that feels a bit bad about not reviewing each book I read. These days it feels a little bit too much like my only purpose for reading is to consume content rather than letting things affect and change me. The sitting down and at least making a paragraph about each book does help to consolidate thoughts I have. But it takes so much energy, and I probably have another book a flick away at on my screen.

I could argue a big chunk of my “making stuff about library adjacent topics” energy went into the radio show over the last year, but I’d let the reviews trail off well before that. Now with the new job and not doing the radio show any more, maybe there’s room to come back at this again.

In any case, I have been studiously tracking what I’ve been reading even if I haven’t been spewing my thoughts on it at whatever reading audience I still might have. Here’s the list of books I read in 2016. I might finish another Dark Tower book and this little treatise on crime in Canadian football before the year is up but whatevs. (formatting key: ebookscomicsrereads)

Elric of Melniboné (The Elric Saga, #1) by Michael Moorcock

Delta Green: Dark Theatres by Benjamin Adams (Ed.)

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin

Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly by Dennis Detwiller

The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson

Oblivion by David Foster Wallace

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

The Weird of the White Wolf (The Elric Saga, #3) by Michael Moorcock

The Vanishing Tower (The Elric Saga, #4) by Michael Moorcock

Stormbringer (The Elric Saga, #6) by Michael Moorcock

The Bane of the Black Sword (The Elric Saga, #5) by Michael Moorcock

Trashed by Derf Backderf

This Census-Taker by China Miéville

Slade House by David Mitchell

Engraved on the Eye by Saladin Ahmed

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) by Connie Willis

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan

Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1) by Neal Stephenson

How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, #2) by Neal Stephenson

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, #3) by Neal Stephenson

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

The City & the City by China Miéville

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt

H. P. Lovecraft and the Black Magickal Tradition: The Master of Horror’s Influence on Modern Occultism by John L. Steadman

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński

The Starry Rift by James Tiptree Jr.

The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) by Stephen King

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

The Player of Games (Culture, #2) by Iain M. Banks

How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

Empire Ascendant (Worldbreaker Saga, #2) by Kameron Hurley

The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death by Colson Whitehead

Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

Jaws by Peter Benchley

Pretty Deadly, Vol. 2: The Bear by Kelly Sue DeConnick

Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier

The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy by J. Takakusu

Hunter’s Run by George R.R. Martin

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1) by N.K. Jemisin

The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2) by Stephen King

The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, #3) by Stephen King

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1) by Liu Cixin

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2) by Liu Cixin

Death’s End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3) by Liu Cixin

The Slow Regard of Silent Things (The Kingkiller Chronicle #2.5) by Patrick Rothfuss

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4) by Stephen King

The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2) by N.K. Jemisin

American Utopia by Fredric Jameson

Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling by Tom Babin

Sex Criminals, Volume Three: Three the Hard Way by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1) by Becky Chambers

The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

So yeah, I read 110 books this year. There are fewer comics on here than I feel is usual for me but there’s a fair number of re-reads. Those both kind of inflate the totals if you’re looking at this as a numbers game.

I’ve been trying to read more nonfiction and I think that kind of shows up in the list. I’ve also been trying to read more books by women, but as the list shows, I haven’t been successful at that (a quick perusal shows only 18 or 19). Under a bit of duress I’ve been buying fewer books than is my wont (only 6 from this list are things I purchased this year) but as my partner tells me, I do work in a library.

That’s been my year. I also read too many tweets and articles about politics and celebrities dying. Fuck 2016.